We have sent to X a formal request for information under the Digital Services Act.
It follows indications of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech.
We are investigating X's compliance with the #DSA, including:
Policies and practices regarding notices on illegal content
Complaint handling
Risk assessment measures to mitigate the risks identified.
These Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs) impact our lives greatly.
That is why we have designated 17 VLOPs and 2 VLOSEs to meet the full range of new obligations under our Digital Services Act (#DSA) within four months.
This will empower users, protect minors, reduce disinformation and increase #transparency.
Wiecie, że na Facebooku pojawił się nowy typ konta, który nie wymaga od tworzącej go osoby podania prawdziwego imienia i nazwiska? Obstawiam, że to weszło wraz z DSA (choć istnieje możliwość, że wcześniej, a ja to zauważyłam dopiero po otrzymaniu pierwszego zaproszenia do znajomych z takiego profilu). W każdym razie dobrze, że serwis takie konta odpowiednio oznacza.
Pendant ce temps-là, sur Twitter/X :
La plateforme a dû déclarer ses ressources de modération du contenu, dans son rapport obligatoire pour le DSA. On apprend qu'il n'y a que 52 modérateurs qui parlent français. Pour d'autres langues européennes il n'y en a que 1. #twitter#dsa
Das hat mir Instagram gerade angezeigt: Entweder ich zahle Geld & werde nicht mehr personalisiert getrackt oder ich zahle nicht & werde getrackt. Weiß jemand, ob sie einen wirklich nicht tracken, wenn man zahlt? Ist jemand im Stande, das zu überprüfen? #DSA#DigitalServicesAct
Reading through Das Schwarze Auge adventure A1 Die Verschwörung von Gareth (The Conspiracy of Gareth) from 1985, by Reinhold H. Mai and Andreas Blumenkamp.
And oh boy, this is like a quantum leap in scenario design and complexity, if everything you knew before was the B-series.
This now classifies itself as the A-series (for "Ausbau" extension) and is written for the rules of the Abenteuer Ausbau Set, a rules and lore expansion that came out in early '85.
First INTERNATIONAL law on AI. Don’t dismiss what China, Australia, Brasil, & others have achieved. But not only is the #AIAct big in itself. It, the #DSA the #DMA, & yes the #GDPR are important first steps to how we can ALL regulate transnational entities https://video.consilium.europa.eu/event/en/27283
Admittedly in a much diminished state than at it’s heyday.
I don’t know if you ever heard the term Usenet before, and even if you did, if you don’t just connect it with data piracy. Because that’s what it is mostly used for nowadays.
What it started out as were discussion forums.
Back in the late 70s, after ARPANET had been created and email had been invented, a few programmers came up with an idea for an electronic bulletin board that could be read asynchronously. This was the time when computers still were only in big institutions like universities, big companies, and the military, and the whole idea was to create “a poor man’s ARPANET”. Connections between computers were rare and expensive , but possible. So these “news” started as a way to propagate articles and messages along servers that were not constantly connected to the internet. Some of the servers involved would only connect once a day to the network to transfer messages in and out (often at night because charges were lower then). A message might travel for multiple days before it reached all nodes in the network, and some of the earliest were messages about a nascent hobby popular among the people using this network: fantasy role-playing.
From what I can see the first two messages on the brand new group net.games.frp were sent out on the 12th of January 1982.
To give you an idea just how early this was: it was before the abbreviation RPG became common, people were still talking about Fantasy RolePlaying instead, so even today the group-names use the abbreviation FRP.
It’s quite a fascinating system that over time has become ever more complex and popular, before the ascent of html, hyperlinks, and the world wide web pushed it into the seedy corners of the ‘net.
Instead of having websites, Usenet is organized in newsgroups, and those groups are organized in hierarchies. There are the so called Big Eight that have a certain standard for group creation and posting (e.g. rec. for recreational topics, and comp. for topics concerning computers), and there are others, organized in one way or another (famously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hierarchy which had lower standards for the creation of new groups).
Messages are sent to one or more groups (crossposted), distributed around the network, and people respond to these posts. Interesting discussions and arguments ensue, people get angry, flame wars ensue, other people learn something new, weird in-jokes develop, stuff happens.
All that can be read via archives, the biggest of which is Google Groups, which both is a boon and downfall of the service: Google purchased the old newsgroup archives of DejaNews back in the 90s, and integrated it in it’s Google Groups service. In a picture-perfect example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the users of Groups had a web interface that allowed them access to their old newsgroups, access to new groups that only existed on Google, but also allowed spammers to flood the connected newsgroups with loads of unmoderated spam. Spam that recently was quoted by them as a reason to cut the connection with Usenet, bringing this phase of the network to an end.
But Usenet still is running, and most likely will be running as long as there are people willing to run servers for it. But the biggest Usenet servers nowadays are piracy servers that keep the text-part of the Usenet as more of an afterthought. At one point someone came up with a way to use the text-only format of Usenet in a way to distribute data that was binary, i.e. not purely text. And this took over most of the system.
But I am not really interested in that and never was. What I am interested in are the fantasy roleplaying parts of that network.
rec.games.frp.*
I said that the forum has been running since the late 70s, but that’s not quite correct. The original structure of Usenet grew organically from the beginning. People were creating new groups when it suited them and it seemed logical. Which soon caused some hierarchies (specifically the net. hierarchy) to swell with groups that could barely be maintained. In a great upheaval in 1987 all the groups were renamed and restructured.
Some old hands are still angry about it and will bitch about it for days. That also is Usenet.
One can argue that the fantasy roleplaying group has existed since before that time. One also could argue that it only exists since 1987. Which still is older than the World Wide Web.
Usenet is divided into hierarchies, and the frp-hierarchy is part of the rec. (recreation-hierarchy) and .games. sub-hierarchy.
There are currently 11 .frp. groups in that hierarchy:
rec.games.frp.dnd
of course… it’s the hierarchy for Dungeons and Dragons. Always one of the biggest topics of the whole FRP forums this one got it’s own group.
rec.games.frp.misc
for basically all other kinds of discussions about roleplaying games
rec.games.frp.cyber
for cyberpunk systems (e.g. Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun).
rec.games.frp.super-heroes
for superhero games
rec.games.frp.live-action
anything LARP goes here.
rec.games.frp.announce
announcements and news about products go here
rec.games.frp.industry
for all kinds of discussions about the rpg industry
rec.games.frp.storyteller
yes, this was created when the World of Darkness was big enough to demand it’s own forum
rec.games.frp.gurps
For GURPS, this part was created because while never the most popular game, it’s fans flooded the main group with so many messages about builds that it was decided to give them their own place.
rec.games.frp.advocacy
all kinds of discussions about roleplaying games as such and how they work. This is where the Forge came from back in the day
rec.games.frp.market
I guess this is for selling stuff. I have literally never seen a message in there.
Most of these lay fallow right now, with me and a few others being the only ones posting there every once in a while. I do have to admit part of it is because I don’t want to lose the that part of ttrpg history to a random deletion request for non-use.
Other TTRPG groups
The main hierarchies are not the only ones. Most normal Usenet servers carry at least the Big Eight, but most also carry others. The big other hierarchy is alt. (…definitely not named for Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists, all evidence to the contrary…), which makes it easier to create groups. This means there are a few other groups here that might be of interest, if they ever would get someone to post in them. Their structure though is not as organized as the ones in the Big 8.
alt.games.frp.adnd-util
about utilities for playing ADnD. I would say, a general groups for RPG utilities.
alt.games.adnd
for ADnD. I am not sure why this exists, maybe because the main one was too stodgy, or it was created because someone thought ADnD was sufficiently different than DnD to warrant it’s own group
alt.games.earthdawn
for Earthdawn. Remember Earthdawn?
alt.games.x-files.rpg
For the X-Files RPG. Remember that?
alt.games.whitewolf
I guess a group for White Wolf games, which is also already covered in rec.games.frp.storyteller
alt.games.tolkien.rpg
a group about playing in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth
There are also local and language dependent groups around. Many languages and regions have their own hierarchies for exchanges between locals and/or in other languages.
uk.games.roleplay
group for roleplaying in the UK
de.rec.spiele.rpg.misc
general group for discussions of RPGs in German
z-netz.freizeit.rollenspiele.dsa
originally this was an Echo in a mailbox network, by now z-netz. is a small alternative German Usenet hierarchy. This particular one about Das Schwarze Auge/The Dark Eye
pl.rec.gry.rpg
Polish-language group
es.rec.juegos.rol
Spanish-language group
se.spel.rollspel
Swedish-language group
dk.fritid.rollespil
Danish-language group
fr.rec.jeux.jdf
French-language group
it.hobby.giochi.gdr
Italian-language group
hr.rec.igre.rpg
Hungarian-language group
aus.games.roleplay
Australian group
There are more, some of which I might not even find that easy because they are not on the servers I frequent (not all servers carry all groups) or are so specialized they might not be of interest to anyone but locals (e.g. saar.rec.rollenspiele exists, but I doubt many people in Saarland (the smallest of Germany’s federal states) still know Usenet exists)
Ok, ok, but how do you actually ACCESS this Usenet thingy?
That’s a bit more difficult, but not much. It used to be ISPs were all running their own news servers, this was actually the REASON you might want internet access as a private person, but that isn’t the case anymore. Google Groups is also going away, so that’s not a real option.
An easy way to check out what is being talked about on the FRP-hierarchy is campaignwiki.org/news. This server makes it possible to read and post on his own small server via a web-interface. The server is only running roleplaying-related groups, including the global FRP-hierarchy, and a few local ones that do not get carried in many other places.
Another way to access it via web browser is via web gateways. There are a few around, e.g. NovaBBS. There are a few of those around, but they might not carry all the groups (NovaBBS e.g. only rec.games.frp.dnd and .misc, because those are the ones with most activity).
The proper way to use it is of course by getting an account on a news server and adding it to your feed reader of choice. True hardcore users use terminal-based readers like tin or Gnus, but many Email programs like Mozilla Thunderbirdallow you to subscribe to newsgroups.
Most of these have instructions on how to connect on their websites.
Note: This is a redo of an article I wrote 13 years ago. Originally I thought I could just let that one stand like that, but just briefly reading through it I noticed things had changed dramatically in some areas. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch.
Benieuwd of internetbedrijven de #DSA op een manier kunnen spinnen waardoor gebruikers de schuld van ongemakken bij de EU leggen.
Zie de GDPR. Insteek daar was om verhandelen gevevens websitebezoekers door third parties in te dijken.
Dat hebben platformen en websites omgedraaid in: we blijven dezelfde data vergaren en verkopen, maar we gaan de gebruiker pesten met dark pattern cookie popups.
Elke site die je zo'n popup toont wil gewoon verder gaan met je data monetizen bij brokers.
#UlozTo mění zásadně pravidla pro uložená data od 1.12.
Tak si jen říkám, jak máme sdílet větší soubory, e-mailem to nejde, tak zbývá jedině server někde mimo EU a nebo prostě nahrávat na vlastní server a poslat někomu odkaz ke stažení? Osobně teda budu preferovat tu poslední možnost.
Čekal bych, že aspoň to sdílení odkazu na Uložto bude dál fungovat. To je teda absurdní nový zákon #DSA...
Detailní info zde https://ulozto.cz/faq#backup
On #WorldPressFreedomDay, we stand together to defend the fundamental right to press freedom and media independence – and to honour those who have sacrificed their lives to bring us the truth.
But we don't just pay lip service to this ideal. With the European Media Freedom Act, the #DSA and the fight against SLAPPs, we're committed to protecting media professionals.
Let's promote a society where the free flow of information is valued and defended.
So for people who may have been wondering “what the hell?” with regards to #DSA statements and positions on the #Hamas attacks on #Israel and on #Palestine more generally (because I’m certainly one of those people), this article provides a very clear explanation.
DSA’s success and growth in recent years made it a target for infiltration and co-opting by militant burn-it-all-down types, basically.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) was apparently caught on camera pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building. He may have been trying to prevent the vote on the CR. His spokesperson admits it was him, but says he didn't trigger the alarm intentionally.
Bowman is part of the House's pro-Republican leftist extremist contingent. And he's a member of #DSA, a lunatic leftist fringe group that supports Putin's genocide in Ukraine.
Meine Online-#DSA-Runde reist heute an für ein #Rollenspiel-Wochenende in Person. 🎉
Dank Bahnstreik müssen sie Autofahren und sich gegenseitig einsammeln. Ankunft ist daher erst nach Mitternacht.
Uns entgeht also der Freitag Abend zum Beschnuppern und Einspielen.
Ich freu mich trotzdem wie eine Efferdgeweihte über eine steife Brise! (... 🤷♀️ ...)
Vor allem die Aussicht darauf, einmal ohne Technikprobleme spielen zu können, erheitert mich. 😄
Wann war dein letzter ausgiebiger #pnpde-Tag? :W20:
"X heeft 1 Nederlandse mod, TikTok 167 - Inzicht in aantal moderators dankzij DSA
'Zeer grote onlineplatforms' hadden tot begin november om hun eerste transparantierapporten uit te brengen zoals de Europese Digital Services Act vereist. Daarmee worden veel interessante gegevens voor het eerst openbaar, zoals het aantal Nederlandstalige moderators per platform."
“#BigTech companies calling for government help is to me like a circle of anonymous alcoholics, ‘I need help because I can't stop myself’. These are the big companies getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the capital market, and who now go to governments telling ‘we don't know what we're doing’. This cannot be. With big power comes big responsibility to society.” — Roberto Viola, DGCNECT at #NGIForum23@EC_NGI
Livestream: https://ngiforum2023.eu/live-streaming/plenaries-sessions-15-11/ #DSA#AIAct
Da draußen gerade der Winterfrost🥶 eingebrochen ist, werde ich heute Abend die Tagesschau einfach skippen und dafür in der warmen Badewanne diese beiden #DSA#Fantasy#Roman -e von Ina Kramer aus den tiefsten 1990er Jahren anfangen und mich aus dieser Welt und vor allem dieser Zeit einfach wegbeamen. Die Rezensionen waren überwiegend positiv, auch wenn die Cover ultra trashig (wie so oft damals) sind.
Thalionmel klingt elfisch und bei den ganzen Schwertern geht es bestimmt irgendwie um Rondra?🤔
You discovered a gift idea on your favourite social media;
You found it at the best price online;
You probably wanted to pay for it instantly.
We have been busy wrapping new initiatives to help you and your dear ones make your online experience better with:
👾 the entry into force of #DMA and #DSA, for a safer digital space
👾 the proposal for #instantpayments, for citizens, businesses to transfer euros within ten seconds – at no extra cost